Can you imagine how depressing it would be to live in Judah during those six long years when Athaliah reigned as queen?
An evil descendant of King Omri of Israel, Queen Athaliah quickly seized the throne in Jerusalem when her son Ahaziah was killed by Jehu after ruling as king over Judah for only one year. One of her first acts was to slaughter all the members of the royal family (vs. 10).
The people of Judah, who had long been promised that a descendant of David would always rule over them, were surely devastated to see the rightful line of kings cruelly supplanted by Athaliah. Certainly it would have appeared that God had broken his word to the nation and that the descendants of David would no longer rule Judah. The promise of the Messiah would ring hollow.
What they did not know - what they could not have known - was that a young child, Joash, himself a son of Ahaziah and thus a descendant of David, had been secreted away from the rest of the family and saved when the killing of the royal family broke out. Thanks to faithful Jehoshabeath and Jehoiada, Joash stayed hidden while he grew to an age when he could rule with the help of trusted advisers. He was a kind of "buried treasure", awaiting the day when he would be able to assume his rightful place on the throne of Judah as a son of David!
It makes you wonder what kind of "behind the scenes" action takes place yet today of which we are not even aware, but which God fully knows and is actually orchestrating. Could there be "buried treasure" going undiscovered somewhere in the modern world while God waits for it to develop? I would bet on it!
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